CAConrad & Laura V. Rivera

CAConrad is the author of six books including ECODEVIANCE: (Soma)tics for the Future Wilderness (Wave Books, 2014), A BEAUTIFUL MARSUPIAL AFTERNOON (WAVE Books, 2012) and The Book of Frank (WAVE Books, 2010). A 2014 Lannan Fellow, a 2013 MacDowell Fellow, and a 2011 Pew Fellow, he also conducts workshops on (Soma)tic poetry and Ecopoetics. Visit him online at CAConrad.blogspot.com

Laura V. Rivera is a young Los Angeles based writer and performer originally from Puerto Rico. She is the founding editor of online poetry journal, Circle (http://barukh.com/Circle/index.html). Her works include “You Will Close Your Eyes,” a live group hypnosis, and a chapbook of photographs and poetry documenting a transmigration (City of the Soul). Her new chapbook of poems, Apartment Complex, features work written during periods of experimental hermitism. She is a UCLA Creative Writing alum and is approaching studies in clinical psychology and traditional psychoanalysis. She is interested in effecting altered states, making bad video, and amateur brain surgery.

Upper Limit Los Angeles

About the Bureau

The Poetic Research Bureau is a valise fiction and portable literary service in Northeast Los Angeles.

Our living room at 951 Chung King Rd in Chinatown hosts an extended community of autodidacts and guessworkers caught up in language, inquiry and the unguarded arts. Just as it is: a community free school by day, and by night, a non-professional public forum for presentations, readings, screenings and sundry intellectual exchanges.

As an out-of-pocket California milk-crate boosterist enterprise, the PRB also serves as the irregular literary umbrella for projects such as occasional poetry journal The Germ ('97-'05), edited by Andrew Maxwell and Macgregor Card; and art-lit mag Area Sneaks, edited by Rita Gonzalez and Joseph Mosconi.

As a research bloc, the Bureau attempts to cultivate composition, publication and distribution strategies that enlarge the public domain. It favors appropriations, impersonations, 'compost' poetries, belated conversations, unprintable jokes and doodles, 'unoriginal' literature, historical thefts and pastiche. The publication emphasis is on ephemeral works, short-run magazines and folios, short-lived reprints and excerpts in print-on-demand formats, and the occasional literary fetish objects of stupidly incomparable price and value.

Several reading series are hosted at 951 CKR, and we welcome writers whose work lacks the 'commercial tendency' while harboring the bright, high-minded intentions that often lead to broad panic, righteous perversions, improbable arguments, and the ill-served cul-de-sacs of genius. The series are coordinated by the aforementioned Messrs Maxwell and Mosconi. If you're sympatico, passing through town, or need a megaphone, 50 seats and a big blank space, give us a write.